A moment later the ground rumbled and everyone stopped what they were doing as an aftershock coursed through Bam's cemetery as it was being turned into something of an industrial facility on Sunday.

At least seven diggers were constantly ploughing trenches in the sandy ground around the cemetery, as the smell of decomposing corpses hung in the air. Van after van brought in bodies wrapped in blankets and covered in white sheets in columns of three or four. The only visible sign of the dead were their toes poking out from their shrouds.

A mother helpless with grief crawled into a mass grave after her three-month-old infant. "I do not want to leave my family," she wailed. "I have no one left."

With water supplies limited, the clerics cleansed the bodies by rubbing gravel on the forehead of the dead and the back of their hands, an alternative Islamic ritual.

Zinat, 17, could not bear to watch. "I do not want my parents and my sisters to be buried like this," she said.

Under Islamic law, women's bodies have to be blessed by a female relative. The ritual is the same as for men. But in a corner lay countless unidentified women waiting to be blessed before burial. Officials can keep them there for 24 hours, but then a female official will perform the duty. In a ruined school, widows and orphaned children were being kept with 24-hour psychological counselling teams. "They can't bear to see the people they worked and lived with lying dead on the streets," the manager said.